Shade Decker
by jokergirl1
Summary: An old Starwars Fanfic. A freed slave turns to the dark side. Think you know that from somewhere? Well, this time the slave is female. It's set a some time after the whole SW movies and related stories, in a dark future...
1. Shade chapter 1 and fragments

Shade 

shade decker. real name: jade. property of master keroo mango. race: human/elfish - female. born: 14. period of the 5th orbit, jagvyb. mother: fara, property of shari kilu, died 15. period of the 5th orbit, kha bri. height: 2,9xx. weight: ,45yl. 

escaped 3rd period of the 9th orbit, kolan's third planet, from the property of shari hanoo. now property of master mango. 

WANTED PREFERABLY ALIVE. 

(0) Prologue - The desert 

Jade knew they would come.   
She had known, even before the first buzzer on the Extreme Line had taken up their tracks and awakened her while the first short chance of sleeping alone since Master Hanoo had come back to supervise the harvest. It hadn't been distinctively knowing - she just had sensed something would happen, someone would come - someone strong, in a way she never had encountered before, had come near, had entered their solar system.   
Jade also knew she shouldn't have been able to sense that way - it was definitely not the way things had to be sensed, not, that is, by a simple slave girl.   
Which is what Jade was and ever had been...   
Slowly lifting her veil that had protected her eyes against the glare of the desert sun, she turned to the endless Dry Sea of Kolan's Third Planet - a planet so remote and hostile to any form of life that it hadn't even been given a name when first discovered by settlers. No one could possibly like to live here if he didn't happen to be predisposed as a masochist, or had a very good reason to hide away from the rest of the world.   
Which was the reason why Jades Master lived here.   
Jade sighed as she searched the saddle of her desert glider for the tele-scanner. With a little effort, she could see the buzzer - actually a small, converted probe droid - from where she was; but the sunlight here could make a man blind in less than one minute, and Jade knew that former slaves of Master Hanoo already had decided to kill themselves that way: running away into the desert, getting first blind and then lost, eventually killed by either heat or thirst - or both.   
Master Hanoo didn't have to prevent his slaves from running off with guards or walls: the desert did it for him, silent, but insurmountable.   
When she finally had set her visor to the dune where the buzzer was standing, Jade was surprised of how small it was. Not that she had imagined the buzzer to be as big as the heavy harvest droids at the plantation, but the air and the distractionless plains of the desert - the Dry Sea - made the smallest point look much bigger and nearer than it actually was. But, although any distraction would have been easily sighted, there was nothing but the buzzer droid out there on the horizon; and Jade realized that whatever it was that had roused the buzzer had to be beyond the horizon - out of her reach, for her desert glider was not able to drive to the Extreme Line without its own fuel not depending on the main reactor. For today her task was done. Jade would have to report the alert to her Master's guards, and they would check out if either the buzzer was broken or if there really was an intruder.   
What a shame.   
But, as Jade turned away, she suddenly had a clear view of what it was that had come down beyond the Far Line.   
The buzzer wasn't broken - it was a spaceship, and it had crashed there.   
Both passengers had survived, and Jade even had the impression that at least one of them was in great pain - she could feel it pass through her body, but as fast disappearing as she regained control of her body and realized that it wasn't her that was injured.   
With a sudden cold fascination she was tempted to explore those feelings again, get into this body that was hurt and for sure not her own. But she had already been out there for too long; it was time to get back to the houses and join the harvesters.   
Feeling a strange, cold smile on her face, Jade turned away from that invisible wreck and mounted her glider bike. She did not worry about those visitors; as clearly as she had sensed them coming she knew they wouldn't die out there in the desert (although she should have known that this would be against all odds), and they would come to her sooner or later. She also knew she would not tell it the guards, nor anyone other; for the first time, she felt the sensation of having an advantage to the others, and she had to admit, it was a good one.   
Riding back to the farm, she wondered if she would ever be able to put that grin from her face to hide her discovery as long as possible. 

(1)The Colonies 

Even in the Great Chronicles of space and time, the history of the Colonies is summed up in one sentence.   
"Those times were the happiest the Galaxy had seen for a long time. The Republic flourished; as more and more nations joined it, (...) _even settlers were sent out to the until now just roughly known quadrants on the frontiers of and between the known 'civilized territories'._   
(...) But, of course, the Sith did not sleep. (...) When (the attack) finally came, the Republic, thoroughly unable to even settle up their forces, was smashed into pieces.(...)   
In a desperate attack, the remaining Jedi Knights, known as 'the Last Levy' under the command of Old Master Anh Ho-Far, managed to destroy big parts of the Imperial Royal Fleet whilst a visit of the New Emperor SkoanAr. He and most of his counsellors died before the Imperial troops were able to react and destroy the Rebel Fleet. Although there still are legends that some Jedi survived, the Imperial Chronicles tell us that every ship was blown up at the outer space battlefield, Parsecs from every possible shelter.   
Out of the ruins, both Empire and Republic struggled to recover and to rebuild their forces. Some nations now decided to stay independent from now on; others, formerly republican, now pactised with the Empire. (...) Though no definite frontiers were drawn, we now can describe the quadrants between the Bael Suns and the Japhyr Kingdom as Imperial or at least Empire-sympathisant; the former Republican states all fell off except for the former Alderaan Kingdom and most of the Moth Treatise States (short MTS)..."   
The question of what happened to those settlements built up by the then Central Forces of the MTS never appears in any of the historic Chronicles of that time; in fact they were first forgotten, then denied when the Republic had first come out of its ruins and got settled. The pioneers were abandoned and taken not for dead, but like they never had existed.   
But although they were never meant to survive without the help from their mother countries, some of the settlements remained and tried to call for help to the Republic, which, laying in ruins itself wasn't even able to respond.   
The Empire, now without Emperor, did not divide officially, but in fact the power was moved to the Grand Moffs of the individual districts, who usually ruled at their own free justice. The few remnants of the Sith, former advisors to the Emperor, tried to hold them together under a council like the Imperial Senate, but without the Emperor, they remained the relict of a time long gone, with no real power.   
The Colonies, if even noticed by the Moffs, were soon conquered and enslaved.   
So the people of the Colonies, betrayed and abandoned by both the Republic and the Empire, were soon to build up their own forms of administration: usually mean, Mafia-like rings of drug-, spice- and slave dealers, paramilitary troops and multiple-colored and -shaped PaShas of planets and systems who dealt with all of them - and sometimes even more.   
To sum it up in one sentence, the Colonies at this time are not a good place to go after dark - and as it's the same term in Space, neither before dark. 

(3)   
And, into all this struggle, Jade was born.   
Born, and by the moment of her birth or even sooner, sold. She was a slave from birth on - the daughter of a slave girl born free: her mother, of no further use for her master - Jades father - was immediately after Jades birth sold to the spice mines of KhaBri and killed herself the next day. Jade passed into the property of Master Mango, the slave dealer who had sold her mother to Jades father and later to the mine Shah.   
Mango, one of the best slave dealers in that corner of the galaxy - maybe the best ever - knew the desires of his customers: he could deliver slaves of every race, sex, age and appearance at any time, although he better liked to deliver regularly. His slaves were passed, according to age, from master to master, some - like Jade - from infancy on. And in the end, the last stop would always be the so-called "mines": spice or gas mines, or plantations, on remote planets whose unwholesome atmospheres would kill the workers within a few months, sometimes just within days.   
Master Mango knew all about his job, but he didn't feel bad: his green-grey Reptinsectoid face, even if it could move, would remain unmoved. As one of the last members of his race - the Pra Tuinn had been almost completely killed when their solar system was destroyed during the Koralheim Battle - he had evolved above the needs of sexual propagation, but he had a strong sense of how to make money with the needs of evolutionary behind races. And as he had nothing to lose, he was more reckless than any other slave dealer at that time - which was the secret of his success.   
Jade didn't know anything about that, and she never should know; but her given instinct and the people she met - slaves like her - taught her soon to hate Mango.   
Hate, without knowing why or what it meant: it remained a dull, animal feeling stored away in a dark corner of her mind. But as least a feeling, and maybe the only stronger feeling she should learn to know in her life: never having known freedom, she remained indifferent to any change, which was usually the change of her master. She had learned it as the way life had to be, and no one would tell her otherwise. Why bother her with things she couldn't have changed even if she knew about them? And so she remained - well, not happy, but at least content with her life because there never had been better times she could worry about. She was born to serve, and so she did, as good as she could. For her, it was easy to adapt to the wishes of her masters, the strange they might be - she never had known pride. And if there was pain - there often was, for her masters didn't care too much about "replaceable" slave girls - it would go by, and if not, she would die eventually. But she also would die if there never had been pain in her life, so again, why bother?   
This does not mean she was stupid: she sure had a sharp and distinct sense of people's emotions and thoughts, which helped her not just to adapt to her ever-changing masters, but also to deal with the "senior" slaves and their ranks. She was never really liked, but in lack of any incidents which could serve as pretexts, thoroughly tolerated. The best way to describe her mind is to call her ignorant: not knowing, in any sense of the word, and not caring about that fact. She lived her life (if you can call this life) dull, instinctively, but tenaciously, as if something had stored away her mind in this growing stronger body to hibernate, having left the body with the instruction to protect its life until the mind had found a place to spread.   
Even her shown hate to Master Mango was therefore nothing more than the imitation of the other's behaviour: her real hate she had sensed from the others and learned to feel herself was stored away in that dark corner of her mind - that corner that also knew people were not meant to be unfree, and for sure not Jade. One day, yes, the mind knew it would find a place to spread its stored feelings, break open and take revenge for all the years Jade had lost unfree; but yet it slumbered, hidden within this slavish body, and collecting power. It could wait...   
And, though she never would have admitted it, Jade herself was like one of those small, predacious animals her master on Loqan had owned: motionless they would wait for their prey to come out for hours - a by chance passing viewer would have taken them for statues - but with eye-striking quickness when it came to hunt and catch.   
Catch, but not kill - Jade later should discover that she also liked, if you can call it so, playing with her prey, like the animals she had been fascinated of when she was a child. 

(4) 

A bell toll.   
For the split of a second, Decker imagined his teacher silently laughing at him whilst waiting for him to fight - or fail.   
Not this time.   
He clenched his fists and wished again he had taken his lightsaber with him. He knew he wasn't allowed to; but standing here without even the surety to have it there when he needed it made him feel even more desperate. Calm down, he said to himself, every Jedi Knight had to do this, even your teachers. They didn't fail, and you won't fail either.   
But in a deeper layer of his mind the words changed into the faint, but distinct suspicion his teachers had had easier tasks, more luck, or - the idea came over him like a flood of cold water - just had been stronger than him.   
So that was it.   
He would fail.   
No, he told himself, you won't fail. Don't think about it. Ease. Feel the Force. Be at one with it. You will make it. You will...   
The attack came before he had even halfway got at one with it.   
Decker yelled, stumbling forward, blindfolded.   
He stared into the dark, trying to discover his enemy. But there was nothing. Nothing, just a distinctive type of darkness that said that at fact there was something, something darker than dark...   
Something that had been here longer than life... just waiting for you.   
Yes, for you, Coron Decker.   
This time he was warned.   
When it attacked again, Decker hurled aside, feeling the cold air that surrounded the beast rushing over his body. But this time he wasn't afraid anymore.   
Now he could feel it, with all his senses.   
He even saw it, using the force as his eyes. Reaching a branch where he could shelter from the beast while it gathered strength for his next attack, Decker tried to scan the beast again to build up a strategy. He took a deep breath and concentrated on the force.   
But, at once, the beast had gone.   
He had reached the point where he had seen the beast with the force and expected now to share the emotions - or non-emotions - of the beast, but his mind had got through the place without finding any resistance.   
Had the beast moved? Decker tried to scan the whole area - now again using the force as his eyes (maybe the beast was one of the few species being able to shield from the force) but again found nothing.   
He suddenly realized that there really was nothing.   
Nothing, but, with one hitch: there had to be something.   
Or not?   
Decker heard his own breathing louder than ever before while he left his shelter and ran into the darkness which seemed to reveal even more darkness, sure with something in it (he could feel the trees and stones with the force now, ensuring him that he had not lost his sense of the force at all) but suddenly forcing on him the strong impression that it only built up for him, breeding darkness because he himself expected it to be dark. In a crazy thought, he asked himself whether it would make a change if he would imagine it to be lighted - it didn't seem that unlikely to him.   
He closed his eyes, imagined light, and opened them again.   
Nothing.   
Of course.   
He hadn't believed it himself, at least not strongly enough... But, for now, this was not his task.   
The beast, he remembered.   
Where had it gone?   
Had it ever been there?   
His fear crept up his neck again, paralysing him as he tried to feel the beast. It was everywhere and at the same time nowhere at all. He knew it would come, all of a sudden, killing him and destroying his plans to be a Jedi forever.   
The darkness felt to close up on him like a blanket made of pure fear and death. His desperation rose.   
And then, the anger came.   
He let out a wild shout, grabbed a shattered stone next to him and threw it into the direction he suspected the beast.   
And hit it.   
The beast, now clearly standing out against the forest, slowly rose up to its full height, and then, fatally injured, turned and fell - into Decker's direction.   
Decker, unable to move or even cry, watched it slowly coming down, taking him with it to the ground. And then there was dark - a deeper, calmer one this time. 

"You're dead, Coron," a voice said.   
  
  


(here the missing parts should be inserted...)   
  


Waking up from a sleep so deep it felt bottomless, Jade felt there was something odd. At first, she didn't know what this was, it was not a distinctive feeling, but still... something was missing.   
Then she remembered.   
She sat up in one fluent movement, and touched her feet. Her anklets.   
The transponder chain had gone.   
How? I'd be dead by now...   
But it had gone, had been destroyed without killing her. Somehow Decker must have managed...   
Decker!   
She was free now, he had told her... free... she chewed around at this word, not really able to put a contextual meaning to it in her mind. It is like jumping from a cliff, she thought. Nobody can tell you until you experienced it.   
How she hated this Jedi metaphorics.   
Instead, she let go the thought and looked around the spacecraft in search of a washing device. Decker would not like me dirty, she thought with her certain kind of sarcasm.   
The ship was well-equipped, for it had been master Hanoo's own spaceyaught. Jade recognized it now, though she never had been in that part of it - those must be the very private quarters, where even slaves were not allowed (better put, wanted) to go. It had not just an ultrasound device, which the girl detested - the for human beings non-audible sound was a painful, ear-splitting shriek to her elfish ears - but a genuine water shower as well, a luxury which must have cost not just a small fortune, at this end of the galaxy. Jade enjoyed the rarely-experienced feeling of real, warm water, aqua, running down her body, making her forget the bruises and scratches she got from their escape. 

(tbc)   



	2. Ire kills the Angels

_T_he angels, frozen for so many years in the ground of Iego, woke up one after the other. And as they did, the song started. It seemed to come from nowhere in particular, it just was. Under the ice, there something slowly started to move, melting the ice with first faint, then growing stronger sounds that emerged from faint dark outlines of their bodies together with diffuse halos of light.   
And then Ramón suddenly knew all about them as the music covered the land.   
They did not emit light and sound; they _were_ light and sound. The shapes that covered them were just a minor part of them, like jelly-fish that consist mostly of water and evaporate in the sunlight. As they woke up, their life came back together with the sound.   
It had worked.   
His companions smiled with him; he could sense it although they were standing behind him. Presently, they turned away; they had done their duty and it was now part of the angels to fulfil theirs. But Ramóns smile stood on – he felt that on this planet he'd got something back he hadn't even known he'd lost, and nobody could ever take it away again. He felt a great inner peace, though he knew he wouldn't remember the angels' sound itself – nobody could – but he would never forget it.   
As the faint cold sun rose further over the horizon, the scenery of Iego had changed. From everywhere one horizon to the other the shapes that had been hidden in the ice floated out of the ground, ascended into the atmosphere and hovered meters from the icy ground. And yet the angel's song was everywhere, though nobody was there to listen to it. The quiet sun dried the stony ground and what could not dry froze again into the ice from which the angels had emerged.   
But though they had just hatched the angels knew there was danger and they knew their mission. They had no language, did not need to communicate. But there was a dark one among them, a knight of the darkness that had hatched before they had been allowed to. Where would it be? They would sacrifice themselves to stop it – as they could not survive but for a short while outside their home moon. But the sun would rise another time, in the far future, and then maybe other angels would come. There was no question and no resentment. They would die in order to ban darkness among the universe.   
The cold sun reflected from yet another celestial object, but this time it was artificial.   
A dark tiny spaceship emerged from the nightside of the planet of Iego and then clearly stood out against its giant orb, heading for the tiny moon on the western rim of the lighted disk. Noiseless it floated through the airless space, unnoticed by the leaving ship of the company that was but a distant star now. But it did not belong here; its mere being here seemed to disturb the harmony of space. Here nothing was artificial, nor would it be for at least the next some million years. The sun was young, and so were the planets. The angels, as wonderful as they were, were, after space's laws, primitive. And as the days were so short and the nights so long on their tiny moon, evolution would not take place until a long, long time.   
Ironically as it was, the pilot of the displaced-looking ship was in fact coming home... 

The hatch opened and crashed onto the frozen ground that reverberated with the frightening sound of pulsing and breaking ice. Winds that had not blown on the moon for five hundred years during its grand voyage around the planet and just began to blow as the atmosphere warmed up broke themselves on the hull of a dark ship – something that had never happened before on this planet. As they swirled away leaving traces of rippled snow on their way, the dark being that left the ship looked for one instant as it had sent them out as a foreboding of its coming.   
Silently, the pilot looked out onto the plains that hadn't been changed for five hundred years, and should now be alive for a time shorter than the blink of an eye in the history of Space. She looked out for those that had awoken.   
The sound changed its tune as the sudden cold wind disturbed the angels. They sensed their quest had come. And yet they were but half-conscious, apparently emerged from but in fact still held by the ice they had slept in for the last aeons. They struggled to free themselves from the sleep on their souls; but that needed time, and not even angels could change that. Captured to the ground like hatched butterflies whose wings hadn't dried yet, they saw the dark pilot as it appeared on the ground close to them. Too close for even an attempt to flee or defend themselves.   
Ire drew and lighted her scimitar. 

One by one, the voices of the angels changed into a shrill cry, like all animals of all worlds struggling in one final cry of death summed up in this tones. By a light stronger than theirs, the light of the angels was shed and broke the ice where an angel had gone down and died. Small tornadoes formed from the snow that was vaporized into the atmosphere. Pieces of the creatures' metal bodies now rained down all over the place when the dark Angel raged like a stormwind would do on a strange planet the race of the Angels now would never get to know. One fragment flew off like a bolt as the angel was cut in the half by the light scimitar. It hit a rock-pin that exploded in a tiny blast of light, as if the soul of the angel would itself glow up again for a final cry. Others fell, burning, as they tried to destroy the scimitar flying against it. Wind joined the cries of the angels and the surreal sounds of the falling metal forming a symphony of death. The heavenly world of the Angels had turned into a maddening hell.   
The Dark Angel fulfilled her duty as neat and thoroughly as she would have done everything else. For she knew no mercy and those were not her people. Forgotten was the fact that she was of the same race; she was a creature of the darkness, of the evil – a servant of the great dæmon Death. Evil streamed through her and reinforced her with every angel that fell.   
Temperature sank rapidly. Moisture that had been in the air flocked out into a snow that danced in the wind and fell, silently, to the icy ground. Dead, like the angels - for ever.   
Unconcerned, the warrior returned to her ship after the last angel had fallen. She did not bother staying here a second longer than necessary – the voice of the planet was proof enough that even the last angel was dead. Her mission was fulfilled. Without looking back, she started after the ship that had left in the direction of Mnimon. 

A last single high-pitched tone hovered over the planet. But there was nobody to tell whether it would stay on to tell the fate of the angels or fade and die away like the last of them.   



End file.
